NIH chief Collins says Americans should 'take a breath' after J&J vaccine pause: 'The sky is not falling'

National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Dr. Francis Collins praised federal health officials Thursday for their handling of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause, telling "Your World": "I think they're doing it exactly right."

We don't, at the present time, know that answer right now. It's primarily women, but not exclusively women. It seems to be something that happens about a week or two weeks after you've had your immunization. It's clearly caused by the generation of a strange autoantibody, an autoimmune response that causes the platelets in your blood to begin to be very sticky. It's platelets that cause clots.  So we think we understand this in terms of the mechanism. We don't understand what triggers it. We also know how to treat it and that's a reason to be public about this,so that all the clinicians, the doctors out there, should they encounter another person who’s had this vaccine in the last week or two who show up with these symptoms, they know what to do. People that have had this vaccine in the last week or so, which includes my 21-year-old granddaughter, people are interested in knowing what we should be doing that’s different. This is sort of a million to one rare event. If you compare the risks of what this vaccine might mean compared to the risk of actually getting COVID-19 and getting infected, there's just no comparison in terms of the likelihood of a really bad outcome. We know this virus has killed over 560,000 people. So even with this identification of trouble, people should be reassured we’re on the right path.